Title: At the Mountains of Madness
Author: H.P. Lovecraft
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Language: English
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At the Mountains of Madness

by

H.P. Lovecraft

This e-book edition: Project Gutenberg Australia, 2015

At The Mountains Of Madness is a novella...written in
February/March 1931 and originally serialized in the February, March and
April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.... The story is written in
first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor at
Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely
kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized
scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party
of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and
horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than
the Himalayas. — Wikipedia

Astounding Stories, February 1936, with first part of
"At the Mountains of Madness"
Cover artist: Howard V. Brown

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I AM forced into speech because men of science have refused
to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will
that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the
antarctic—with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and
melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my
warning may be in vain.

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing
left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count
in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be
doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried.
The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures,
notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark
and puzzle over.

In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific
leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to
weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of
certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand,
sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash
and over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness. It is
an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my
associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of
making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly
controversial nature are concerned.

It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense,
specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a
geologist, my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was
wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various
parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by
Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be
a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this
new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths
would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary
methods of collection.

Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our
reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity
to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the
small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of
varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible
wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and
sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep
all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog
sledges could carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of
which most of the metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier
aeroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary
on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting
devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a
base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points,
and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.

We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or
longer, if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the
mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in
varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent
changes of camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be
of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented
amount of material—especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so
narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished
also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous
rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and death is
of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past. That the
antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming
vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and
penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common
information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy,
and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would
enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable size
and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the
upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land
surfaces—these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile
or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not
afford to waste drilling the depth of any considerable amount of mere
glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper
electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice
with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan—which we
could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as
ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow,
despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent
wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and
through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men
from the University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of
the physics department—also a meteorologist—and myself,
representing geology and having nominal command—besides sixteen
assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled
mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but
two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood
navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In
addition, of course, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for
ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were fully manned.

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special
contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely
thorough, despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges,
machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were
delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvelously
well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to
supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the
excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which
made our own expedition— ample though it was—so little noticed by
the world at large.

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd,
1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal,
and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on
final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar
regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B.
Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the
sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque
Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.

As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the
north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62°
South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—table-like objects with
vertical sides—and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which we
crossed on October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were
considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me
considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace
up for the worse rigors to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric
effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid
mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became
the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor
thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude
175°. On the morning of October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the
south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a
vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the
whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown
continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously
the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round
Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated
base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in
South Latitude 77° 9'.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren
peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern
sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight
poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes,
and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept
ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences
sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping,
with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious
mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something
about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions
of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later
on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college
library.

On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been
temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the
cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of
the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low,
white line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of
two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of
southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off
the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some
twelve thousand, seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese
print of the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike
height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine hundred feet in altitude, and now
extinct as a volcano.

Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate
assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out
what looked like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain,
discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when he
wrote seven years later:

— the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole —
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good
deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's
only long story—the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon
Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background,
myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat
seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of
slowly drifting ice.

Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly
after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each
of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy
arrangement. Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were poignant
and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton
expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's
slope was only a provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham.
We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions,
gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and
aerial, aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small
portable wireless outfits—besides those in the planes—capable of
communicating with the Arkham's large outfit from any part of the
antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's outfit,
communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the
Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head,
Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic
summer; but if this proved impossible, we would winter on the Arkham,
sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for
another summer's supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our
early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at
several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie's
apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional
test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great
barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge
aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—
twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs—was remarkable, though of
course we had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or
windstorms. For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or
25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to
rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be
a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies.

Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring
material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the
storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case
all our exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other
planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle
transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the
great plateau from six hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond
Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds
and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with
intermediate bases, taking our chances in the interest of economy and
probable efficiency.

Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop
flight of our squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast
peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of
our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped
us through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed
ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore
Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was
now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line. At last we were
truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as we
realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering
up to its height of almost fifteen thousand feet.

The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in
Latitude 86° 7', East Longitude 174° 23', and the phenomenally rapid and
effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge
trips and short aeroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous
and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate
students—Gedney and Carroll—on December 13—15. We were some
eight thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level, and when experimental
drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and
ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting
apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no
previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The
pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our
belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of the
continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward
below South America—which we then thought to form a separate and
smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross
and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed
their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments;
notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as
linguellae and gastropods—all of which seemed of real significance in
connection with the region's primordial history. There was also a queer
triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake
pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted
aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious
marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it
looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the
sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into
which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself
produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no
reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.

On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and
myself flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being
forced down once by a sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not develop
into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several
observation flights, during others of which we tried to discern new
topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early
flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they afforded us
some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of
the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some brief
foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and
often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet
land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the
low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing
to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent
void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.

At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five
hundred miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a
fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental
division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there
would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained
excellent—lime juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and
salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without
our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be
able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long
antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west,
but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary
aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the
principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed
been almost uncanny.

The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of
Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather,
northwestward—prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new
base. It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical
daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it
certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his
curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings
in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently
belonged. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some
bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably
advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so
vastly ancient a date—Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian—as to
preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of
any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These
fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a
thousand million years old.

POPULAR imagination, I judge, responded actively to our
wireless bulletins of Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden
by human foot or penetrated by human imagination, though we did not mention
his wild hopes of revolutionizing the entire sciences of biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th with
Pabodie and five others—marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when
crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice—had brought up
more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the
singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient
stratum. These markings, however, were of very primitive life forms involving
no great paradox except that any life forms should occur in rock as
definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the
good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving
program—an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men,
and the whole of the expedition's mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the
end, veto the plan, though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party
despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would
remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the
eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer, one of the planes had begun
to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait
temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to
be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world
of aeon-long death.

Lake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out
its own reports from the shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being
simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the
Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world
on wave lengths up to fifty meters. The start was made January 22nd at 4
A.M., and the first wireless message we received came only two hours later,
when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore
at a point some three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a
second and very excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby
a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of
slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had
caused the original puzzlement.

Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight
in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of
protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens
made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point
of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the
whole expedition's success; but it was appalling to think of his plunging
deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of
tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some fifteen
hundred miles to the half-known, half-suspected coast line of Queen Mary and
Knox Lands.

Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message
from Lake's moving plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me
wish I had accompanied the party:

"10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied
mountain range ahead higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas,
allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15', Longitude 113° 10'
E. Reaches far as can see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones.
All peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes
navigation."

After that Pabodie, the men and I hung breathlessly over the receiver.
Thought of this titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles away inflamed
our deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not
ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour Lake called
us again:

"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but
nobody hurt and perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three
for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel
needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going up
scouting in Carroll's plane, with all weight out.

"You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five
thousand feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with
theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for
formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata
mixed in. Queer skyline effects—regular sections of cubes clinging to
highest peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land
of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish
you were here to study."

Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought
for a moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo
Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the
messages; for Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the
important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We
were sorry, of course, about the damaged aeroplane, but hoped it could be
easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake:

"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try
really tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work
climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly
solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas,
and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many
other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either
direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about twenty-one
thousand feet.

"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with
exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like
the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings.
Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were
formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most
edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes
for millions of years.

"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any
visible strata on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close
flying shows many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or
semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on
top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand
feet. Am up twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself, in devilish, gnawing
cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no
flying danger so far."

From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment,
and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied
that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and
I would work out the best gasoline plan—just where and how to
concentrate our supply in view of the expedition's altered character.
Obviously, Lake's boring operations, as well as his aeroplane activities,
would require a great deal for the new base which he planned to establish at
the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might
not be made, after all, this season. In connection with this business I
called Captain Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the
ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we had left there. A direct
route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we
really ought to establish.

Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where
Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already
progressed somewhat. The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and
there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point
before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the
ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations
at being in the lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall
reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had
placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from thirty thousand to
thirty-four thousand feet. The windswept nature of the terrain clearly
disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales,
violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more
than five miles from where the higher foothills rose abruptly. I could almost
trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words—flashed across a
glacial void of seven hundred miles—as he urged that we all hasten with
the matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible.
He was about to rest now, after a continuous day's work of almost
unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.

In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain
Douglas at their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake's
planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well
as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending
on our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days, since Lake
had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern
base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip we would
not use it till the next summer, and, meanwhile, Lake must send a plane to
explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.

Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as
the case might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly
straight from Lake's base to the Arkham without returning to this
spot. Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard
snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent village.
Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base
would need, even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be
ready for the northwestward move after one day's work and one night's
rest.

Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that
time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His
working day had started unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the
nearly-exposed rock surfaces showed an entire absence of those Archaean and
primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part
of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp.
Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones
and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black
outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake,
whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than five hundred million
years older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate
vein in which he had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long
sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic
mountains themselves.

He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the
expedition's general program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to
work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the
damaged aeroplane. The softest visible rock—a sandstone about a quarter
of a mile from the camp—had been chosen for the first sampling; and the
drill made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting. It was
about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the
operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young
Gedney— the acting foreman—rushed into the camp with the
startling news.

They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place
to a vein of Comanchian limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals,
echini, and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges
and marine vertebrate bones—the latter probably of teleosts, sharks,
and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as affording the first
vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward
the drill head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly
new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A
good-sized blast had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a
jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned
before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more
than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone
tropic world.

The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended
off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which
suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and
floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some
of which met in columnar form: but important above all else was the vast
deposit of shells and bones, which in places nearly choked the passage.
Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and
forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this
osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and
other animal species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or
classified in a year. Mollusks, crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and early mammals—great and small, known and unknown.
No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder everyone else
dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall
derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished
aeons.

When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled
a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to
dispatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told
of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms,
remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments,
dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones,
Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other
bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons,
and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true
camel, deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits
had occurred during the Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain
in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for at least thirty
million years.

On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in
the highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of
such typical embedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably
Comanchian and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space
included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as
peculiar to far older periods—even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and
corals as remote as the Silurian or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was
that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree
of continuity between the life of over three hundred million years ago and
that of only thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended
beyond the Oligocene Age when the cavern was closed was of course past all
speculation. In any event, the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene
some five hundred thousand years ago—a mere yesterday as compared with
the age of this cavity—must have put an end to any of the primal forms
which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.

Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another
bulletin written and dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton
could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the
planes, transmitting to me—and to the Arkham for relaying to the
outside world—the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a
succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the
excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's
reports—reports which have finally led, after all these years, to the
organization of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious
to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages literally as
Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them from the
pencil shorthand:

"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone
and limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated
prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over
six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate
morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints
apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones.
Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology what
Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work
and amplifies conclusions.

"Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or
cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells.
Was evolved and specialized not later than a thousand million years ago, when
planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or normal
protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took
place."

"Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine
saurians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to
bony structure not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal
of any period, of two sorts—straight, penetrant bores, and apparently
hacking incisions. One or two cases of cleanly severed bones. Not many
specimens affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend
search area underground by hacking away stalactites."

"Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across
and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local
formation— greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has curious
smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken
off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in center of surface.
Small, smooth depression in center of unbroken surface. Arouses much
curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of water action.
Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of
geologic significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing
uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any
peculiar odor. Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start
on underground area."

"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground
at 9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown
nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine
radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but
astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends
and around sides. Six feet end to end, three and five-tenths feet central
diameter, tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging
ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at
equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious
growths— combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All
greatly damaged but one, which gives almost seven-foot wing spread.
Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled
Elder Things in Necronomicon.

"Their wings seem to be membranous, stretched on frame work of glandular
tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body
shriveled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there.
Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or
animal. Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set
all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens. Additional
scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They
can't endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we
didn't keep it at a distance from them."

"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest—I
might say transcendent—importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head
Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints
in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at
underground point forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and
configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously
found—star-shaped, but no marks of breakage except at some of the
points.

"Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have
brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the
things. Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy
Papers must get this right.

"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso
three and five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark
gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same
color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework
tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread
wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the
five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms
or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length
of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three
inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which
branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils,
giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.

"Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch
flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of
top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion
where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised
globe, evidently an eye.

"Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of
starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon
pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined
with sharp, white tooth like projections—probably mouths. All these
tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes
and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite
vast toughness.

"Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter
at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached
small end of a greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and
six wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has
made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years
old.

"From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes
tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips.
All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible.
Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort,
marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated
muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudoneck
and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.

"Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use
in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting
vegetable 's essential up-and-down structure rather than animal's
fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even
simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to
origin.

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of
primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes
inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark
Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I
speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or
mistake. Students have always thought conception formed from morbid
imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric
folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of—Cthulhu cult appendages,
etc.

"Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early
Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites
deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage.
State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No
more found so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge
specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted
near them.

"With nine men—three left to guard the dogs—we ought to manage
the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plane
communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But I've got to
dissect one of these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real
laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my
westward trip. First the world's greatest mountains, and then this. If this
last isn't the high spot of the expedition, I don't know what is. We're made
scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now
will Arkham please repeat description?"

The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost
beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm.
McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the
droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand
version as soon as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the
epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations
as soon as the Arkham's operator had repeated back the descriptive
parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his station
at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Captain Douglas of the
Arkham. Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be
relayed through the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was
an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to
Lake's camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that
a rising mountain gale made early aerial travel impossible.

But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish
disappointment. Lake, sending more messages, told of the completely
successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had
been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had
accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building a
snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be
brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on
the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude
attempts at dissection.

This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for,
despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the
deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen—a powerful and
intact one—lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was
puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence
destructive enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for.
He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens; but these were too few to
use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply.
Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though having
remnants of the starfish arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and
partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.

Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative
indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments
hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved
left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly
revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows
about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of
perhaps forty million years, the internal organs were wholly intact. The
leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent
attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some
paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of
speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent
produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor
was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a
thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By the time
Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the still
uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a savage
barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.

Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection
merely deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been
correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the
thing animal; but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences
that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and
eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped
base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiration apparatus handled oxygen
rather than carbon dioxide, and there were odd evidences of air-storage
chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at
least two other fully developed breathing systems—gills and pores.
Clearly, it was amphibian, and probably adapted to long airless hibernation
periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connection with the main
respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution.
Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely
conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly
probable. The muscular system was almost prematurely developed.

The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake
aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing
had a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of
specialized development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and
there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry
cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism.
Probably it has more than five senses, so that its habits could not be
predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a
creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its
primal world—much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like
the vegetable cryptogams, especially the Pteridophyta, having spore cases at
the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or
prothallus.

But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a
radiate, but was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had
three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in
origin, its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly
indicated; yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later
adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the
aerial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a
new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond
conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great
Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke
or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a
folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department.

Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having
been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly
rejected this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural
qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours showed
decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudofeet had
decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified.
Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of
retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts
were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been
solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name—jocosely
dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."

At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a
little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from
the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest.
The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so
that the head points and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding; but
Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the
almost subzero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens close
together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct
solar rays. That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the
dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem, even at their
substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an
increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He
had to weight down the corners of the tent cloth with heavy blocks of snow to
hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan mountains seemed about
to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions about sudden
antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's supervision precautions were
taken to bank the tents, new dog corral, and crude aeroplane shelters with
snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow
blocks during odd moments, were by no means as high as they should have been;
and Lake finally detached all hands from other tasks to work on them.

It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us
all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls
were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether,
and repeated his praise of the really marvelous drills that had helped him
make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a
warm word of congratulations, owning up that he was right about the western
trip, and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If
the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base.
Just before retiring I dispatched a final message to the Arkham with
instructions about toning down the day's news for the outside world, since
the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until
further substantiated.

NONE of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously
that morning. Both the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury
of the wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we
were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp,
directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was
awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but
some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to
prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas
told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not
known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite
its persistent rage where we were.

Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at
intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of
wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our
camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M.
After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get
Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with an excellent
short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of
crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony silence
continued, and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had
in his locality we could not help making the more direful conjectures.

By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a
wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps
toward investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo
Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready
for instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been
saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me
with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as
possible, the air conditions being apparently highly favorable. We then
talked over the personnel of the coming investigation party, and decided that
we would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I had
kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge
planes built to our special orders for heavy machinery transportation. At
intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no
purpose.

Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30, and
reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our
base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky
business sailing over the antarctic in a single aeroplane without any line of
bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We
turned in at two o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of
the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading and
packing.

At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under
McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food
supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere
was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we
anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude
designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what
we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey, for silence
continued to answer all calls dispatched to the camp.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss,
at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's
laws. Thenceforward the ten of us—but the student Danforth and myself
above all others—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking
horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain
from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed
the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course,
our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken
surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our
sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and
Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau.
There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in any
words the press would understand, and a latter point when we had to adopt an
actual rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and
pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great
cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence;
hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because
of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into
the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish
summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as
seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of
iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent,
pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if
these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into
forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and
ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil
things— mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some
accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held
ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than
terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness,
separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and
unfathomed austral world.

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of
the higher mountain skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of
perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed
justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple
ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by
Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole
unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we
first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too,
another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of
how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau
of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central
Asia; but the racial memory of man—or of his predecessors—is
long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and
mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human
world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin
for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the
devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng,
wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be
in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such
ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned. At the
moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or
talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the
university.

This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre
mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew
near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the
foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks,
some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present example;
but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism,
and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and
minarets loomed out of the troubled ice vapors above our heads.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or
to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying
monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones,
sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and
there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped
disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of
multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with
each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids
either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and
pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All
of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing
from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the
whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type
of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the
arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time and place, with those dark,
unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world
discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the
greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent
malignity and infinitely evil portent.

I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the
various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of
even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning
opalescence we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's end
was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome
rampart of giants, their curious regularities showing with startling
clearness even without a field glass. We were over the lowest foothills now,
and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a
couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring. The
higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a range
almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks beyond
them. At length Ropes —the student who had relieved McTighe at the
controls—began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose
size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last
uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.

Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the
rest of our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded
report of the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of
the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the
night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned
our hazy lack of details through realization of the shock the sad event must
have caused us, and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of
the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation
outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress,
utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the
truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we
dared not tell; what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others
off from nameless terrors.

It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could
have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to
doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles, must have been
beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane
shelter-wall, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate
state—was nearly pulverized—and the derrick at the distant boring
was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and
drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents
were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the
blaster were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow
were completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the
Archaean biological objects in a condition to take outside as a whole. We did
gather some minerals from a vast, tumbled pile, including several of the
greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint
patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil
bones, among which were the most typical of the curiously injured
specimens.

None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the
camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the
greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward one,
suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three
sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown
them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring
were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that
subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise
left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes; since our surviving
party had only four real pilots—Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and
Ropes—in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We
brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we
could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents and
furs were either missing or badly out of condition.

It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to
give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the
Arkham for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and
noncommittal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation
concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens
was to be expected from poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think,
their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish
soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region—objects
including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp
and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise
tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular curiosity and
investigativeness.

About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We
said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left
of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It was
hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter—and we did
not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find.
We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the
part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect
monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under
five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly
those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary
times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been
completely blown away.

We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence
Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the
next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could
possibly cross a range of such height, which mercifully limited that scouting
tour to the two of us. On our return at one A.M., Danforth was close to
hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to
make him promise not to show our sketches and the other things we brought
away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had
agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera films for private development
later on; so that part of my present story will be as new to Pabodie,
McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world in general.
Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than I: for he saw, or thinks he saw, one
thing he will not tell even me.

As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent—a
confirmation of Lake's opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and
other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian
times; a conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and
rampart formations; a decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved
calcareous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of
the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a
remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense superplateau
as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves—twenty thousand
feet in elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin
glacial layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau
surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.

This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it
completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen
hours —a longer time than our announced flying, landing,
reconnoitering, and rock-collecting program called for—to a long
mythical spell of adverse wind conditions, and told truly of our landing on
the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic
enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any
tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop
them—and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we were
gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like
beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for use despite the
altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.

We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our
old base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way
to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straightline flight across the most
utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many
additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our
tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and
horrors around us—which we did not reveal—made us wish only to
escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly
as we could.

As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without
further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next
day—January 27th—after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we
made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and
occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we
had cleared the great plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and
Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear
of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking
mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky
and twisting the wind's wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled
my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of
polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted,
accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and
blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and
swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.

Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic
exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with
splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous
breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors—indeed, as I have
said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even
me, though I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent
to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no
more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression
I gather after those rare, irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed
things to me—things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a
grip on himself again.

It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some
of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We
might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the
results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same
age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological
monstrosities had aroused naturalists and paleontologists to the highest
pitch, though we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we had
taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens
as they were found. We also refrained from showing the more puzzling of the
scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely
guarded the pictures we took or drew on the superplateau across the range,
and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in
our pockets.

But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a
thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they
will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till
they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must break through
all reticences at last—even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond
the mountains of madness.

IT is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my
mind go back to Lake's camp and what we really found there—and to that
other thing beyond the mountains of madness. I am constantly tempted to shirk
the details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable
deductions. I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly over
the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp. I have told of the
wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the
varied uneasiness of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the
deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried
biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for all their structural
injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do not recall whether I
mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing.
We did not think much about that till later —indeed, only Danforth and
I have thought of it at all.

The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to
certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind
of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time, I tried to keep the men's
minds off those points; for it was so much simpler—so much more normal
—to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of
Lake's party. From the look of things, that demon mountain wind must have
been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly
mystery and desolation.

The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies
—men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of
conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable
ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from
strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for
the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage
from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the
hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but the
precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that
monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must have
stampeded—whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing
odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.

But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I
had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though
with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations
and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing
Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have
said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were
incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman
fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies,
quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and
removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of
salt—taken from the ravaged provision chests on the planes— which
conjured up the most horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of
the crude aeroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and
subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any
plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human
incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half
impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded corner of the ruined
inclosure —because that impression did not concern human prints at all,
but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake
had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of
one's imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.

As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the
end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two
men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after
investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as
Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been
removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had already realized that one
of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had found—the one
with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odor—must represent the
collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analyze. On and
around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it did not take
long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and
inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings
of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's anatomical
instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful
cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a
curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten
men; and the canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the
bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of roughly handled
illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too bewildered to
speculate.

This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally
perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured
biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated
technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and
batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the
like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the
spatter-fringed ink blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of
curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other
mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to
abhor this oddly disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of
the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly comical
heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most
unlikely places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or
spent, formed another minor enigma—as did the two or three tent cloths
and fur suits which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox
slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The
maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the
damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent
disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the present
one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at
the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the
departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph
and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could
not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their
clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish
soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the
great mineral pile, we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole
general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the
starfish head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion
must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds of Lake's overwrought
party.

For madness—centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving
agent—was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as
spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that
each of us may have harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to
formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive
aeroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon,
sweeping the horizon with field glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various
missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the titan
barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any
diminution in height or essential structure. On some of the peaks, though,
the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer, having
doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The
distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits
seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.

In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer
scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond
those mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at
midnight after our day of terror and bafflement—but not without a
tentative plan for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened
plane with aerial camera and geologist's outfit, beginning the following
morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at 7
A.M. intending an early flight; however, heavy winds—mentioned in our
brief, bulletin to the outside world—delayed our start till nearly nine
o'clock.

I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp
—and relayed outside—after our return sixteen hours later. It is
now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful
blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden transmontane
world—hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a
nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing
which he thinks he alone saw—even though it was probably a nervous
delusion—and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is;
but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed
whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the
wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I
shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder
horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with
the inner antarctic—or at least from prying too deeply beneath the
surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and inhuman, aeon-cursed
desolation—the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable
evils will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight
and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass
in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about
twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea level. For this
point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our
flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high
continental plateau, was some twelve thousand feet in altitude; hence the
actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem.
Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold
as we rose; for, on account of visibility conditions, we had to leave the
cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.

As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of
crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the
curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the
strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered
rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these
pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly
early time in earth's history—perhaps over fifty million years. How
much higher they had once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about
this strange region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to
change, and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock
disintegration.

But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave
mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field
glass and took aerial photographs while Danforth drove; and at times I
relieved him at the controls—though my aviation knowledge was purely an
amateur's—in order to let him use the binoculars. We could easily see
that much of the material of the things was a lightish Archaean quartzite,
unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the general surface; and
that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an extent which poor Lake
had scarcely hinted.

As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of
savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had
saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the
slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The
whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes, or the
primal foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford Field Museum
Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional
impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his
flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was
frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous
formations often have strange regularities—like the famous Giants'
Causeway in Ireland —but this stupendous range, despite Lake's original
suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in evident
structure.

The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most
abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their
regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often
approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been
shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide
distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was
honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as
we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were
apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the
mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular;
and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering
tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and
strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely
resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish
soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above
those six buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along
toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we
occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering
whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of
earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from
difficult as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad
spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a
Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to
wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass
we found that its case formed no exception.

Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and
peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even
though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially
different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in
these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed
betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be
explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological
symbolism and aesthetic association—a thing mixed up with exotic poetry
and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden
volumes. Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious
malignity; and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a
bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in
and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths. There was a cloudy note
of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of
the other dark impressions.

We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand,
five hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the
region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare
rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but with those
provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the
unnatural, the fantastic, and the dreamlike. Looking along the line of high
peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart
exactly on top. It seemed to be half lost in a queer antarctic
haze—such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake's early
notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept
between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted
with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun—the sky of that
mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.

A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and
I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that
raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines,
exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we
did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets
of an elder and utterly alien earth.

I THINK that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed
awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared
the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural
theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment.
Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the
Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved
rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage
like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those mountains
of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as
our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost
endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone
masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet
not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places
obviously thinner.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish
violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a
hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a
climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred
thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of
orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could
possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause. We had
previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory
that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in
origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have
been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region
succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?

Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean
maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all
comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage
in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a
material basis after all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice
dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its
image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection, Of
course, the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained
things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real
source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant
image.

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and
ramparts had saved the frightful things from utter annihilation in the
hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years it had brooded
there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi—Roof of the
World —" All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked
dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch
primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this
dead antarctic world—of the demoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or
abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their
prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and
of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless
star spawn associated with that semi-entity.

For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very
little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along
the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual
mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an
interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely
struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent. The
foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures,
linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which
evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer
cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the
mountains.

The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from
ten to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness
varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of
dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as
large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet—though in several places it seemed to be carved
out of a solid, uneven bed rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far
from equal in size, there being innumerable honeycomb arrangements of
enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of
these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were
many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other
rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose
five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The
builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and
domes had probably existed in the city's heyday.

The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from
which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial
debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of
the gigantic piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which
connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the
exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher
bridges of the same sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless
largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified
material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing
fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though
wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or
pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved
intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field
glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in
horizontal bands— decorations including those curious groups of dots
whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger
significance.

In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply
riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn
down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the
plateau's interior, to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of
the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings. It probably
represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary
times— millions of years ago—had poured through the city and into
some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly,
this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond
human penetration.

Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing
this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder
that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium, which we did. Of course, we
knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, or our own
consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the
plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of
photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my
case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my
bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom
more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and
lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general
world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could
have had.

For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary
nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's
history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure
and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene
convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom.
Here sprawled a Palaeogaean megalopolis compared with which the fabled
Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoc in the land of
Lomar, are recent things of today—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis
ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in
the land of Mnar, and the Nameless city of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above
that tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds
and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations—even weaving
links betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning
the mad horror at the camp.

The plane's fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only
partly filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even
so, however, we covered an enormous extent of ground—or, rather, air
—after swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually
negligible. There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the
length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty
miles of flight in each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of
rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice. There
were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on
the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the foothills and
approached its sinking place in the great range. The headlands at the
stream's entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something
about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and
confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me.

We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public
squares, and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill
rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice;
but there were at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly
weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other
still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and
roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient
valley of Petra.

Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of
infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless.
After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and
in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of
sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a
broad, depressed line, while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness,
seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.

So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt
at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable.
Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our
navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some
exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a
scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ampler number of possible
landing places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our flight would be
across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in
effecting a landing on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles
and well adapted to a swift and favorable take-off later on.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so
brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level;
hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the
vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot
journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a
small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions,
voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer and chisel, specimen bags,
coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries;
this equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might
be able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and
topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope,
outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to
tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of
hare and hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able
to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system with
air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual
rock-chipping method of trail blazing.

Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous
stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as
keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed
mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar
with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect
of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps
millions of years ago—before any known race of men could have
existed— was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its
implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this
prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both
Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost
any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to
a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther
on there was a huge, roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic
five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet.
For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch
its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an
unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally
closed to our species.

This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point
to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging
6 x 8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about
four feet wide and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the
points of the star and at its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four
feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through these, we could see that the
masonry was fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining
within, and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the
interior walls—facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying low over
this rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally
existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer
of ice and snow at this point.

We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the
nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated
floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city
proper were less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear
interiors leading down to the true ground level if we entered those
structures still roofed at the top. Before we left the rampart we
photographed it carefully, and studied its mortar-less Cyclopean masonry with
complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his
engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks
could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its
outskirts were built up.

The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind
shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background,
was something of which the smallest details will always remain engraved on my
mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me
conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west
lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its outré and incredible
forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in
solid stone, and were it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that
such a thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of
the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry
took in its urban manifestations were past all description.

Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless
variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were
geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name—cones
of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of
provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken
columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of
mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent
parts of the ice sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that
connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly
streets there seemed to be none, the only broad open swath being a mile to
the left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town into
the mountains.

Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced
sculptures and dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine
what the city must once have looked like—even though most of the roofs
and tower tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex
tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all of them deep canyons, and some little
better than tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching
bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream fantasy against a
westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of
early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun
encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow,
the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the
faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes
behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of
our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock
outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an
artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed,
there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.

When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen
masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of
omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that
I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly
jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the
horror at the camp—which I resented all the more because I could not
help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this
morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his
imagination, too; for in one place—where a debris-littered alley turned
a sharp corner —he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings
which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle,
imaginary sound from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, he
said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves, yet somehow
disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding
architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly
sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible
subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and
dwelt in this unhallowed place.

Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead,
and we mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all
the different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full
set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place.
Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic
and Comanchian periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a
greater recency than the Pliocene Age. In stark certainty, we were wandering
amidst a death which had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and in
all probability even longer.

As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at
all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance
possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into
ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One,
though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without
visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified
wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity
implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic
gymnosperms and conifers—especially Cretaceous cycads—and from
fan palms and early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely
later than the Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing of these
shutters—whose edges showed the former presence of queer and
long-vanished hinges— usage seemed to be varied—some being on the
outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They seemed to have
become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and
probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.

After a time we came across a row of windows—in the bulges of a
colossal five-edged cone of undamaged apex—which led into a vast,
well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room
to permit descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to
bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to—especially in this
thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action. This
enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric
torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged
round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips
of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to
enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered.

Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an
archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an
aerial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present
level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story
floors, and in this case one of the floors still existed. The building thus
accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our left facing westward.
That across the alley, where the other archway yawned, was a decrepit
cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the
aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a
well of illimitable emptiness.

Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly
easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the
long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic
mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete
and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming
more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge,
and scrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond
was of great slate slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a long, high
corridor with sculptured walls.

Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the
probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must
begin our system of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto our compasses,
together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range between the towers
in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on,
the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our
extra paper to shreds of suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried
by Danforth, and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow.
This method would probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did
not appear to be any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If
such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could of
course fall back on the more secure though more tedious and retarding method
of rock chipping.

Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to
guess without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the different
buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges
underneath the ice, except where impeded by local collapses and geologic
rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive
constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the
submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that
uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower part for
all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place
had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather
than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming
of the ice been foreseen, and had a nameless population left en masse to seek
a less doomed abode? The precise physiographic conditions attending the
formation of the ice sheet at this point would have to wait for later
solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the
pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible, and perhaps some flood
from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great
range, had helped to create the special state now observable. Imagination
could conceive almost anything in connection with this place.

IT would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account
of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal
masonry— that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the
first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is
especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came
from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight
photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what
we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film
supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient
features after all our films were used up.

The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness,
and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless
geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls,
but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity,
involving curiously irregular difference in floor levels, characterized the
entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset
but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to explore the
more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a
distance of some one hundred feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers
yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over
the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which
everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all
imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to
triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their general
average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though
many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions
and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the submerged part,
where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers
and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular
building. The Cyclopean massiveness and gigantism of everything about us
became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply
unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and
constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon
realized, from what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city was many
million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous
balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the
arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all
portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's
deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal
system of mural sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands
three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands
of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to
this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often,
however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of
dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.

The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically
evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in
every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of
execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest
details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with
astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the
conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy. The arabesques
displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of
obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The
pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and involved a
peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force that moved us
profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods.
Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross
section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical
psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try
to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our
photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque
conceptions of the most daring futurists.

The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth
on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot
groups appeared—evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and
primordial language and alphabet—the depression of the smooth surface
was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half inch more. The
pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief, their background being
depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens
marks of a former coloration could be detected, though for the most part the
untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been
applied. The more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired
the things. Beneath their strict conventionalization one could grasp the
minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed,
the very conventions themselves served to symbolize and accentuate the real
essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too,
that besides these recognizable excellences there were others lurking beyond
the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints
of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background,
and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and
poignant significance to us.

The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the
vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident
history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race—a
chance circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favor
—which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which
caused us to place their photography and transcription above all other
considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the
presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs of an
enlarged scale—these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration
to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what
the whole revealed, I can only hope that my account will not arouse a
curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe me at
all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and
horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive
twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden
planks— elaborately carved and polished—of the actual shutters
and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors
remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to
room. Window frames with odd transparent panes—mostly
elliptical—survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity.
There were also frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once
in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which
was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other
apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical
facilities—heating, lighting, and the like—of a sort suggested in
many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been
inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were
also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.

As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the
sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled
these tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were
generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris, but farther down this
condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was
little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas
had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or
collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones.
A central court—as in other structures we had seen from the
air—saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom had
to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in
many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute
blackness.

To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we
penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a
hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions.
The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough
to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were
the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon
effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon
a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could
exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth—a truth
which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently
suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to
each other. There could now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of
the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of
years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast
dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted—
each to himself—that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant
only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object
which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the
decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the
scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage
tribes some chosen totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from
us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realization
which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can
scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that
will not be necessary.

The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age
of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were
new and almost brainless objects—but the builders of the city were wise
and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a
thousand million years—rocks laid down before the true life of earth
had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells—rocks laid down before the
true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of
that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths
which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon
affrightedly hint about. They were the great "Old Ones" that had filtered
down from the stars when earth was young—the beings whose substance an
alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had
never bred. And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually
looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance—and
that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines—It is of
course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we
picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the
first shock of the certain revelation, we had to pause a while to recuperate,
and it was fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual tour of
systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered were of
relatively late date—perhaps two million years ago—as checked up
by geological, biological, and astronomical features—and embodied an
art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we
found in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One
edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even
fifty million years —to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous—and
contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one
tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed,
the oldest domestic structure we traversed.

Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I
would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a
madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale—
representing the preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other
planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes—can readily be
interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such
parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the
latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to
think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.

Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a
fraction of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the
various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms
were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in
other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms
and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a
frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level—a cavern perhaps
two hundred feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly
been an educational center of some sort. There were many provoking
repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings, since
certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or phases of racial
history, had evidently been favorites with different decorators or dwellers.
Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful in
settling debatable points and filling up gaps.

I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal.
Of course, we even now have only the barest outline—and much of that
was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made.
It may be the effect of this later study—the revived memories and vague
impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with
that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to
me —which has been the immediate source of Danforth's present
breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently
without the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is
a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic
world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that
further exploration be discouraged.

THE full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear
in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only
the salient highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the
sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent,
lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their coming, and the coming of many
other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering.
They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membranous
wings—thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me
by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal,
building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless
adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of
energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed
man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms
only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed
through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon
finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness
of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to
live on a high plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial
manufacture, and even without garments, except for occasional protection
against the elements.

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that
they first created earth life—using available substances according to
long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the
annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other
planets, having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain
multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all
sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal
slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were
without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his
frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that
any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain
alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized
their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed
other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life
for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.

With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift
prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and
imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land.
Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts
of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction.
As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities,
including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we
were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to
explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, which in the actual
city around us had, of course, been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago,
were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs, and showed vast clusters of
needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and
tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts. This
was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by
a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and
tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the
unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's ill-fated
camp.

Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them
migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had
continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head
tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite
the usual way—the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof
waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a
curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision
with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their
heads— senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of
light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed
curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating
processes— probably to secure phosphorescence—which the
bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by
swimming—using the lateral crinoid arms—and partly by wriggling
with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they
accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their
fanlike folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and
then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many
slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely
delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous
coordination—ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic
and other manual operations.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific
pressure of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few
seemed to die at all except by violence, and their burial places were very
limited. The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with
five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a
fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The
beings multiplied by means of spores—like vegetable pteridophytes, as
Lake had suspected—but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage
the large-scale development of new prothallia except when they had new
regions to colonize. The young matured swiftly, and received an education
evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and
aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of
customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming
monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had
the same foundations and essentials.

Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic
substances, they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They
ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They
hunted game and raised meat herds—slaughtering with sharp weapons whose
odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all
ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their natural state could live in
water down to freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on,
however—nearly a million years ago—the land dwellers had to
resort to special measures, including artificial heating—until at last
the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their
prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they absorbed certain
chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat
conditions—but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the
method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state
indefinitely without harm.

Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no
biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize
large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and—as
we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers—
congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything
in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for
decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was
accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land
and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical
frames—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down
tentacles—and racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their
books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no
certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There
was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities—certain
small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably
the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were
pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some
agriculture and much stock raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of
manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent
migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by
which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used,
since in land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess
excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts
of burden— Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive
vertebrates in the later years of land existence.

These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms—
animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial—were the products
of unguided evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping
beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked
because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome
forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in
some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive
mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the
land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were
unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the
high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species
heretofore unknown to paleontology.

The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes
and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though
few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean
Age, there was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission
of their records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the
Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that they came not long after the matter
forming the moon was wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According
to one of the sculptured maps the whole globe was then under water, with
stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons
passed. Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole,
where it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements,
though their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom. Later
maps, which display the land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending
certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of
continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.

With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events
began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not
the worst misfortune. Another race—a land race of beings shaped like
octopi and probably corresponding to fabulous prehuman spawn of
Cthulhu— soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and
precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back
to the sea—a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements.
Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn
whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land cities were
founded—the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this region of first
arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the
center of the Old Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there by the
Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank
again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic
octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one
shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age
their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe—hence the
recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic
borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain widely separated
regions.

The steady trend down the ages was from water to land—a movement
encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly
deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in
breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended.
With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of
creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones
had to depend on the molding of forms already in existence. On land the great
reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of the sea, reproducing
by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence,
presented for a time a formidable problem.

They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the
Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful
temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes
exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past
suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose separate
and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without
always obeying it. Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and
me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed
of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each
averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a
constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in
imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to
suggestion.

They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the
Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a
veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones.
Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the
Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvelously fearsome
quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used
curious weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances against the rebel
entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the
sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed
Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys.
Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of
water, this transition was not encouraged—since their usefulness on
land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their
management.

During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a
new invasion from outer space—this time by half-fungous,
half-crustacean creatures—creatures undoubtedly the same as those
figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in
the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men. To fight these beings the
Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally
forth again into the planetary ether; but, despite all traditional
preparations, found it no longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere.
Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was now
definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of
all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in the
sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original
antarctic habitat was beginning.

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu
spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely
different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones.
They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for
their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even
remoter gulfs of the cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal
toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must
have had their absolute origin within the known space-time
continuum—whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be
guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the
non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are
not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic
framework to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest
and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is
significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent
races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently
in certain obscure legends.

The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain
cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold
deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of
Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an
original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted
apart over a technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested
by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and
the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up—receives
striking support from this uncanny source.

Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or
more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to
separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia
of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other
charts —and most significantly one in connection with the founding
fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us—showed all the
present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable
specimen —dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age—the approximate
world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with
Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America
with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map
the whole globe—ocean floor and rifted land mass alike—bore
symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the
gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene
specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip
of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of
South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a
study of coast lines probably made during long exploration flights on those
fanlike membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old
Ones.

Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal
rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and
other natural causes, was a matter of common record; and it was curious to
observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The
vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general
center of the race—built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic
earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It
appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new
city—many of whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but
which stretched fully a hundred miles along the mountain range in each
direction beyond the farthest limits of our aerial survey—there were
reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first
sea-bottom city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of
the general crumbling of strata.

NATURALLY, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and
a peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate
district in which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast
abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough
to find a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the
story of the region much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence we
derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the last
place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh
immediate objective.

Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of
all the corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely
the most ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must
indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of
the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain
was tremendously long—starting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the
east coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent. That
really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about Latitude 82°, E.
Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 115°, with its concave side
toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long, ice-locked
coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the antarctic
circle.

Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close
at hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the
sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's highest. That grim honor is
beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to
record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and
trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land—the
first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the
moon and the Old Ones had seeped down, from the stars—which had come to
be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled
before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first
great earth buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian Age, a
frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din
and chaos—and earth had received her loftiest and most terrible
mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have
been much over forty thousand feet high—radically vaster than even the
shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared,
from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude
100°—less than three hundred miles away from the dead city, so that we
would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not
been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be
visible from the long antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary Land.

Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to
those mountains—but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay
beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions
conveyed in the carvings, I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting
hills along the coast beyond them—Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm
Lands— and I thank Heaven no one has been able to land and climb those
hills. I am not as skeptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I
do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's notion that lightning paused
meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an
unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the
long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the
old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.

But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less
namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain
range became the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings showed what
grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the
curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had
appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance
of still later epochs, all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed
out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains
below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many
graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final
discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.

This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which
flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had
formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and flowed beside that
chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes's coast
line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its
turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground
waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk
emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much
of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The
Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen
artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the
foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.

This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the
one whose extinct course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in
different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as
it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead history, so
that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features
—squares, important buildings, and the like—for guidance in
further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous
thing as it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the
sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and
suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked
like. It must have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it,
I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the city's
inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight
had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the
denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror;
for there was a somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were
shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object—never
allowed to appear in the design—found in the great river and indicated
as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from
those horrible westward mountains.

It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we
obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's
desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same age
elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a
stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the
existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and
only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I
have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There
would, though, have been a limit—for after all hope of a long future
occupancy of the place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but
have been a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of
course, was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in
thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles—the great
cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of
Lomar and Hyperborea.

Just when this tendency began in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in
terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial
periods at a distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present,
but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All
quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the
decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and
that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the
conventional opening of the Pleistocene—five hundred thousand years
ago—as reckoned in terms of the earth's whole surface.

In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation
everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones.
Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were
represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of
cartouches— the continuous band arrangement being frequently
interrupted in these late carvings—depicting a constantly growing
migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth—some fleeing to
cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down through
networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighboring black
abyss of subterrene waters.

In the end it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the
greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional
sacredness of this special region, but may have been more conclusively
determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great
temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as
a place of summer residence and base of communication with various mines. The
linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several
gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the
chiseling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black
abyss —sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew,
according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were
compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a
reasonable exploring distance of where we were—both being on the
mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter of a mile toward the
ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the
opposite direction.

The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places,
but the Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because of
its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears
to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its
habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seemed to have had no
trouble in adapting themselves to part-time—and eventually, of course,
whole-time—residence under water, since they had never allowed their
gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures which showed how they had
always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they
had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness
of inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to
long antarctic nights.

Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a
truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the
cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically—quarrying
insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing
expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the construction
according to the best methods. These workers brought with them all that was
necessary to establish the new venture—Shoggoth tissue from which to
breed stone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and
other protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting
purposes.

At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its
architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying
relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element
inherent in building operations. The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous
size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing
orders with marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by
mimicking their voices—a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if
poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright—and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They
were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms
supplied light With vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of
the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.

Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in
many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting
especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the
emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their
finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendors than its own
people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more
extensive was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first
wholly abandoned. By the time total abandonment did occur—and it surely
must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced—the
Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had
ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate,
the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale
sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.

The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have
said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a
picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in
summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the
sea-bottom cities off the Antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate doom of
the land city must have been recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs
of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the
terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer.
The saurian livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it
none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become
necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant
Shoggoths to land life —a thing the Old Ones had formerly been
reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost
most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown
away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal
blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the
ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old
Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap? Existing geology shows no
trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the
outer land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or might not
linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's
deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount
of pressure —and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at
times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage and
mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by
Borchgrevingk?

The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for
their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a
very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to their
location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected
that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had
no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary
vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them,
and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains
toward a far-away tropic ocean.

And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens— especially
about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged
camp. There was something abnormal about that whole business— the
strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness— those
frightful graves—the amount and nature of the missing material
—Gedney—the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities,
and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the race to have—
Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared
to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of
primal nature.

I HAVE said that our study of the decadent sculptures
brought about a change in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do
with the chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had
not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the
evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of
about a mile through either of the neighboring tunnels would bring us to the
brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about the great abyss; down whose sides
paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and
nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which
seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of the thing—yet we
realized we must begin the quest at once if we expected to include it in our
present trip.

It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let
our torches burn on forever. We had done so much studying and copying below
the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of
nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula, would
obviously be good for only about four more—though by keeping one torch
unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we might
manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a
light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we
must give up all further mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit
the place for days and perhaps weeks of intensive study and
photography—curiosity having long ago got the better of
horror—but just now we must hasten.

Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were
reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but
we did let one large notebook go. If worse came to worst we could resort to
rock chipping—and of course it would be possible, even in case of
really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another
if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set
off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.

According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we
stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite likely to
be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in
the basement—on the angle nearest the foothills—of a vast
five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature,
which we tried to identify from our aerial survey of the ruins.

No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been
totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter case the
tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the
next nearest one—the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening
river course prevented our trying any of the more southern tunnels on this
trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were choked it was doubtful
whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one
—about a mile beyond our second choice.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and
compass—traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and
clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris,
hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate
stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing
the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the bottom
of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down—we were
repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route. Many must have
told tales of immense historical importance, and only the prospect of later
visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed
down once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had more
films, we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain
bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand-copying was clearly out of the
question.

I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to
hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal
the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's
mouth— having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the
tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in
decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late
workmanship— when, shortly before 8:30 P.M., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog
with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. At first we could not
precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but after a
few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the
thing without flinching. There was an odor—and that odor was vaguely,
subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the
insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.

Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds
now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of
indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat without
further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked
by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have suspected
was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal
world. It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single
torch —tempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that
leered menacingly from the oppressive walls—and which softened our
progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered
floor and heaps of debris.

Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had
passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the
ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of
years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a
kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The irregular
nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places
there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought
there was a hint of parallel tracks as if of runners. This was what made us
pause again.

It was during that pause that we caught—simultaneously this time
—the other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and
more frightful odor—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances—unless, of
course, Gedney—for the odor was the plain and familiar one of common
petrol—every-day gasoline.

Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We
knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled
into this nighted burial place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer
the existence of nameless conditions—present or at least recent just
ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity—or
anxiety—or autohypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility
toward Gedney —or what not—drive us on. Danforth whispered again
of the print he thought he had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above;
and of the faint musical piping—potentially of tremendous significance
in the light of Lake's dissection report, despite its close resemblance to
the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he thought he had
shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn,
whispered of how the camp was left—of what had disappeared, and of how
the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—a
wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown,
primal masonry— But we could not convince each other, or even
ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood
still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the
blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we
guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris
formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew
stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very
soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too
correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. Our
tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach
the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.

The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked
corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of
obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odor—quite submerging
that other hint of odor—came with especial distinctness. As we looked
more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent
clearing away of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking
horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly
manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable
time before making any further motion.

And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression
was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured
Crypt —a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there
remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked
instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment,
however, Danforth's sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris
had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. Though what
we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less
reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough leveling
of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered, and
at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been
spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at this extreme
superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of
camp—a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been turned back
by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.

Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was
concerned, all from Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened
as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three
illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with
its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly
snipped fragments of fur and tent cloth, a used electric battery with
circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and
a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough but when we smoothed
out the papers and looked at what was on them, we felt we had come to the
worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which
might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the
prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those
found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane
five-pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have
prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy or lack of
it— which outlined the neighboring parts of the city and traced the way
from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a place
we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast
circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey—to the present five-pointed
structure and the tunnel mouth therein.

He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were
quite obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere
in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and
used. But what the art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute
those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite
haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were
taken —the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones
themselves in the dead city's heyday.

There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee
for our lives after that; since our conclusions were now—
notwithstanding their wildness—completely fixed, and of a nature I need
not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we
were mad—for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of
madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit—albeit
in a less extreme form—in the men who stalk deadly beasts through
African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with
terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing
flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

Of course we did not mean to face that—or those—which we knew
had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this
time have found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed
within, to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the
ultimate gulf—the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that
entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking
another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.

Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form
our new emotions took—just what change of immediate objective it was
that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face
what we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking,
unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point.
Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though
there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place
shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized it as
a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but
appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the
impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think
that its subglacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance.
Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was
certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it
figured—being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its
carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it
might form a good present link with the upper world—a shorter route
than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which those
others had descended.

At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches—
which quite perfectly confirmed our own—and start back over the
indicated course to the circular place; the course which our nameless
predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring gate
to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our
journey—during which we continued to leave an economical trail of
paper—for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had
reached the cul-de-sac; except that it tended to adhere more closely to the
ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we
could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter underfoot; and
after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again
faintly conscious —spasmodically—of that more hideous and more
persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former course, we
sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls;
noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which
indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.

About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose
increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose
roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and
were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast
circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very
great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic
ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond there
stretched a prodigious round space—fully two hundred feet in diameter
—strewn with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding
to the one we were about to cross. The walls were—in available spaces
—boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and
displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the
spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had encountered before. The
littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true
bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.

But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which,
eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound
spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of
those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique
Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which
confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented our
noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue
to the subglacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of
engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and
marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but
what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was
excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower—a highly
remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure—and its shelter had
done much to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the
walls.

As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous
cylinder bottom—fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—we saw that the
ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet.
This, we recalled from our aerial survey, meant an outside glaciation of some
forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the
top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat
sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the massive curving walls
of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures, the original tower
had stood in the center of an immense circular plaza, and had been perhaps
five hundred or six hundred feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near
the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper rim. Most of the
masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward—a fortunate
happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole
interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering; whilst the choking
was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently
cleared.

It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by
which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route
for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The
tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than
was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial
exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region.
Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips—even after all
we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over the
debris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all
other matters.

It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of
the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been
screened from our view. There they were—the three sledges missing from
Lake's camp—shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible
dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much
hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and
intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar
enough: the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins,
tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious
contents —everything derived from Lake's equipment.

After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared
for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and
undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems
that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical
specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved,
patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred,
and wrapped with care to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of
young Gedney and the missing dog.

MANY people will probably judge us callous as well as mad
for thinking about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our
somber discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately
revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us
and set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin
over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the
sounds finally reached our consciousness—the first sounds we had heard
since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from
its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their
presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than
any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been—since they
gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.

Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range
which Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those others—and
which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl
we had heard since coming on the camp horror—it would have had a kind
of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other
epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise
shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments—all our tacit
acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of
every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any
buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied
polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so
mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea days off Victoria
Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it
here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the
raucous squawking of a penguin.

The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the
corridor whence we had come—regions manifestly in the direction of that
other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a
direction—in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform
lifelessness—could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought
was to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated,
and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we
entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our
trail blazing—with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance
from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—when we left daylight
behind.

As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly
discerned some curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct
print of a sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course
indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass
prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were
glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels
seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the
basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall
from our aerial survey as remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the
single torch showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause
to examine any of these.

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the
second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from
earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their
supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their
scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution
concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white,
waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that
it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and, according to
the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter
despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that
the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed
clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of
our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as
the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others
of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a
penguin— albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of
the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual
eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our
torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they
were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size
reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones'
sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended
from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer
inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and
atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was
the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment to be doubted; and this
evidence of the gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with the
most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.

We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of
their usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it
clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the
manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any
passing party of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that
those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat
supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated could
cause an equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had
obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones—an amicable
relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of
the Old Ones remained. Regretting—in a flare-up of the old spirit of
pure science—that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we
shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose
openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction
occasional penguin tracks made clear.

Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and
peculiarly sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching
the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others
immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which
made us gasp involuntarily—a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously
deep underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with
low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that
one yawning cavernously with a black, arched aperture which broke the
symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance
to the great abyss.

In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though
decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few
albino penguins waddled—aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The
black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its
aperture adorned with grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel. From that
cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even
a suspicion of vapor proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other
than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of
the land and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether
the trace of mountaintop smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as
the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak,
might not be caused by the tortuous-channeled rising of some such vapor from
the unfathomed regions of earth's core.

Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was—at least at the
start—about fifteen feet each way—sides, floor, and arched roof
composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated
with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all
the construction and carving were marvelously well-preserved. The floor was
quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and
the inward tracks of these others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it
became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered
whether there were any actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the
waters of that sunless sea were hot. Alter a short distance the masonry gave
place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions and
presented the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying
grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor. Several times we
noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams;
none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them
welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way
back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct.
Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the
known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain
persons than most suspect—indeed, it was just such a lure which had
brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several
penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to
traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a
mile to the abyss, but our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of
scale were not wholly to be depended on.

Alter about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly
accentuated, and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings
we passed. There was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless
due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly
ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material
shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent cloth taken
from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into which
the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided
increase in the size and number of the side galleries, and concluded that the
densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been
reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely
less offensive odor —of what nature we could not guess, though we
thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Then
came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not
prepared us—a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking
elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long and fifty
broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical
darkness.

Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both
torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of
several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the
high, vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had
been smoothed off, and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a
positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come,
this was true of the floors of all the great galleries opening off from it;
and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling.
The curious new fetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was
excessively pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of the
other. Something about this whole place, with its polished and almost
glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of
the monstrous things we had previously encountered.

The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger
proportion of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the
right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths. Nevertheless
we resolved to resume our paper trailblazing if any further complexity should
develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon
resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel
walls— and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change
which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realized, of
course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the time of the
tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques
in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the
cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—a
difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so
profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto
observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.

This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in
delicacy of detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands
following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier
sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the
general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving—a
sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In
nature it was wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude
spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of
the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a parody than a perpetuation of that
tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but
profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the
technique—an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for
the laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had
come to recognize as the Old Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of
such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the
Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was
hinted by the presence of a used flashlight battery on the floor in front of
one of the most characteristic cartouches.

Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we
resumed our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams
over the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of
the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse
because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and
heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an
infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new
and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a
sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke
increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless
sea cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain
obstructions on the polished floor ahead—obstructions which were quite
definitely not penguins —and turned on our second torch after making
sure that the objects were quite stationary.

STILL another time have I come to a place where it is very
difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are
some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing,
and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the
original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished
floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost
simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing
fetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which
had gone before. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the
obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even
from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been
the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at
poor Lake's camp.

They were, indeed, as lacking—in completeness as most of those we
had unearthed—though it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool
gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater
recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would
have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us.
To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort
of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.

Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our
ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others
disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did
not suggest it, for penguins' beaks against the tough tissues Lake had
dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance
was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared
to be singularly peaceful.

Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent
four responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely
to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the
smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly
reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which
had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then,
have arisen near that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond,
since there were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we
reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the weaker party
seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them.
One could picture the demoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as
it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins
squawking and scurrying ahead.

I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions
slowly and reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all,
but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the
greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things
they had superseded—run back, before we had seen what we did see, and
before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe
easily again!

Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon
realized the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total
decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed; and
as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some
hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their
noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its stench was
half overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more pungent than at
any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the
sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any
immediate source—and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering
certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history in the Permian Age one
hundred and fifty million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which
echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil,
palimpsest carvings.

I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those
primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless
artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete
and prostrate Old Ones—those whom the frightful Shoggoths had
characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great
war of resubjugation. They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when
telling of age-old, bygone things; for Shoggoths and their work ought not to
be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the
Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on
this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had even conceived them. Formless
protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—
viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids
infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities
—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more
amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even those
blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?

And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively
iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank
obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could
envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a
smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots
—we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It
was not fear of those four missing others—for all too well did we
suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not
evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order
of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any
others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in
that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic
homecoming. They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they
done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an
attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense
against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings
and paraphernalia... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists
to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their
place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the
incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a
little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star
spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once
worshipped and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city
brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done.
They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness
they had never seen—and what had they found? All this flashed in unison
through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless,
slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical
dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them—looked and understood
what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city
of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling
mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical
scream.

The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen
us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations
that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment.
It seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more
than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if
veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk—and then came a sound
which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell
and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our
former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the
great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic
plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.

The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided;
because it was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those
we had judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had
caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley corner
above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the
wind pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk
of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if only because of the
surprising way Danforth's impressions chimed with mine. Of course common
reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth
has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which
Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century
ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of
unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic
and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy birds of that malign
region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is exactly
what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing
white mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide
range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered,
though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any
scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a
moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that
nonaggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a
being to spare us in case of capture, if only from scientific curiosity.
After all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself, it would have no
motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our
torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning.
Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again
came that insidious musical piping—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Then,
noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to us that
the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it was
very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream, rather than in
flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of
the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable
nightmare—that fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm
whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and
squirm through the burrows of the hills—we could form no guess; and it
cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One—perhaps
a lone survivor—to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.

Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened
again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying
penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a
panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we
had passed them. Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged
piping—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had been wrong. The thing was
not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen
kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know
what that demon message was—but those burials at Lake's camp had shown
how much importance the beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used
torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where various ways
converged, and we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest
sculptures—almost felt even when scarcely seen —behind. Another
thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing
our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several
of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that
their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of
unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest
limit of traveling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened
squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls,
screen our true course, and somehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning,
spiraling fog, the littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond
this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could
hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as we could
conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones
partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we
were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we
had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the
consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be
unthinkable.

The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing
did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The
penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they
seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick enough
at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to
vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the
nauseously resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one
first and only half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final,
desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with
the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us
was benign, that which gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite;
for to that flash of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror
which has ever since haunted us.

Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the
immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its
pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious
question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all
our faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to
observe and analyze details; yet even so, our latent brain cells must have
wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realized
what it was —that our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those
headless obstructions, and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity,
had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the
neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable fetor
had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given
place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not
done—for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually
undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.

So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the
incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either
from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but
equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light
and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act! Not
Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance.
And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping—"Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!"

I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct
—in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to
be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even
suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so
completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as
planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone
must have carried us through—perhaps better than reason could have
done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we
certainly had little enough left.

Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest
of the journey was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in
which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It
reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins;
reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through
the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—else
we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a
shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.

"South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under
—Kendall—Central—Harvard—" The poor fellow was
chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed
through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet
to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only
horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had
suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and
incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we
had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all
too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and
immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective
embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be;" and its
nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees
it from a station platform —the great black front looming colossally
out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored
lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the
nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it
a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible,
indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries
of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary
eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the
tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins
and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so
evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking
cry—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the
demoniac Shoggoths —given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns
solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups
expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their
bygone masters.

DANFORTH and I have recollections of emerging into the great
sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean
rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if
we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or
orientation. The gray half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us
somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor
Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the
end of this planet will find them still undisturbed.

It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt
the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau
air had produced; but not even fear of collapse could make us pause before
reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely
appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our
panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry, we glimpsed beside
us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and
undecayed technique—a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million
years ago.

Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of
tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward,
and the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more
crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered
redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the
terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by
contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of
the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of
tenuous ice-vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the
outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate
flight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the
mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our
aeroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from that darkness of earth's
secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.

In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the
foothills—the probable ancient terrace—by which we had descended,
and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the
rising slope ahead. Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary
breathing spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of
incredible stone shapes below us—once more outlined mystically against
an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning
haziness; the restless ice-vapors having moved up to the zenith, where their
mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern
which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque
city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights
loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up
toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed
course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow.
For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty,
and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line
could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden
land—highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harborers of
nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who
feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing on earth, but
visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the
plains in the polar night —beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that
dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal
legends hint evasively.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly,
these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred
miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence appear
above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien
planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have
been tremendous beyond all comparison—carrying them up into tenuous
atmospheric strata peopled only by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have
barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I
thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river
had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes—and wondered
how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who
carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near
the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's
expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped
that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might
lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my
overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even
worse.

Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our
plane, our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range
whose recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black,
ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again
reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when
we thought of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their
fetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face
without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave
mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide
range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around
several of the summits —as poor Lake must have done when he made that
early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred
mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous,
horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors came.

All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying
furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very
smooth take-off over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean
masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it, and we began rising
and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very
high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds
of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at twenty-four
thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite
practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping
again became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the
controls. Rank amateur that I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a
better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between
pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties
he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about
me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the
pass—resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top
vapor, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the
Siren's coast to keep that disturbing windpiping from my consciousness.

But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous
nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about
as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled,
cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn
foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then,
just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking
brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and
causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second
afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I
am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.

I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him
scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly
responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted
conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we reached
the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that
had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to
leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people
to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for
the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at
any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind,
that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;
lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously
surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and
wider conquests.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage.
It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those
echoing, vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed;
but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds,
of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones
had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer
delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the
actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced
near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he
suffers from it still.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things
about "The black pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the
windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder
Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of space,"
"the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the
eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully
himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre
reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who
have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the
Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed
enough; and although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its
swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how
vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified
by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—
and, of course, Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till
after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could
never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.

At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad
word of all too obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"